Bonus: Friendly Local Game Pod

0:10 welcome to brains on games i'm dr brian mcdonald and this is a special episode of the show because last week i had a chance to talk to jenna and rachel from the friendly local game pod about gaming with families games that are appropriate for kids with a broad age range and just games that might be fun to play when we're kind of stuck at home on staycations instead of being able to travel here's the interview hopefully you'll enjoy it my name is jenna i am a high school science teacher i just completed my 10th year of teaching crazy enough that it is we did actually finish the school year kind of um and i teach mostly upper-level classes and only life science so not so much physics and chemistry i like the life science kind of stuff biology anatomy environmental all that kind of good stuff is more up my alley i've been teaching i taught for five years at a small school in iowa and i'm originally from iowa and then i got married and we moved up here and i've been teaching for five years here at a small school um yeah i typically say in the smaller schools and i mean small we've got you know generally 40 to 50 kids per grade level so yeah small but i like knowing every kid that walks across that graduation i appreciate being able to have been part of their their education at some point uh and so yeah my husband and i got into board games when we moved up here actually uh time at rachel we went to a board game night oh four years ago i suppose

1:42 and started playing pandemic legacy at a new board game store that had just opened in a town not too far from where we live i live out in the woods if i were to open the window back there you'd see lots of trees um and so we have to drive a little ways but uh we met rachel and her husband jacques at gathering games in richmond wisconsin and we really haven't looked back we did not have this many games that long ago so we have dived headlong into the obsession very quickly um but it has been a wonderful chance for us to meet people uh to socialize to i don't know get off our technology and just enjoy other people's company and um yeah that's kind of where i'm at i grew up on a farm my parents still live back there we go visit once in a while once a month about if we can during non-pandemicy times uh yeah that's that's about it that's me awesome hi i'm rachel i am i grew up in a military family so i'm from all over the place um and my family is very close obviously when you're a military family you are your friend group you know and i played games growing up a few games the standard battleship monopoly but as i was growing older i didn't i didn't really care for games i'm like i don't want to play monopoly again you know and then i started working for borders and borders books and we had a few games there and they're they're no longer in

3:12 business but um then i met my husband as well and my husband loves games and so we played video games together i'd never really played video games it wasn't really a thing in our house and we started playing things like killer bunnies and lots of role-playing games and so that kind of started our our love of gaming and there's a comic book store called the source in st paul big store they also have a fairly large board game and role-playing game section and so because of the crossover in our interest we wound up picking up more and more games and then we started going to the gathering games in new richmond and that's where i met jenna and eventually through a series of events i became a part owner of the gathering games so i have my full-time job as a cube worker and i at night i work as a game store superhero so awesome wow and you're also putting up information about games online yeah yes we just started our podcast yeah yeah ironically on april fool's day in the middle of a pandemic because what better time to start a podcast yeah in a way it was fortunate because it was like well jenna now we don't have an excuse

4:43 we're home we can have figure out how all this technology works and get started so that's fine right and you already had the games in the background oh yes we all needed a distraction from the pandemic so that is definitely come in handy for that yeah absolutely right jenna you said that you had an email from a parent recently and uh i i think i agree with you that this would be a good a a good segue into what we're going to talk about today so can you tell me a little bit about the message that you received yes it's actually from a family that we are somewhat country neighbors with which means they're you know like three miles away but close enough um and uh they have five kids and they also love to play games love to play games all their kids do and so uh their mom was looking for some games that all of them could play uh they have so five kids and two adults that's seven and then there's a couple significant others now the kids couple the kids are older and so they were up to nine which was really stretching my limits of games that i know that are good for nine players but we did come up with a couple that i think would be good for him um uh unfortunately the one that we originally uh forgotten waters which if you haven't played that yet it's wonderful our group ate it up and played so many hours of that game but forgotten waters only plays up to seven but if the adults sat out the kids could all play that together and and whatever so she was looking for games that her family could play

6:13 on their little staycation since they couldn't go anywhere they were going to kind of turn their house into a little vacation spot and try to do some different things so i think she was going to use some of the money they were going to use to travel to purchase a couple games that they they could kind of all play together and so yeah so that's what got us kind of on our topic that we're going to touch on today for nine players and of varying ages right because when it's one family right it's not like everybody the same age that makes it extra challenging it does so their youngest uh is fourth or fifth grade all the way up to junior and college so they've got big range big range of kids they really put you to the test they did but we did come up i did come up with a couple that i thought would work um i came up with just one which i thought they might have to add a couple pieces of paper and other things to write on but i thought that would be a lot of fun for them to play as a family and uh the other one i came up which is a little older so they might have to help the youngest is cartographers but i thought she would get a kick out of drawing and doing some of the fill-in for that flip and write game so those were the two that i came up with that would pretty much account for all of them wow okay so tell me a little bit about just one because i i know a little bit about cartographers uh i met one of the people over there at the at the publisher of cartographers but i know there's nothing at all about just one oh my gosh so just one i i i mean rachel can probably explain it too because we both love this game but

7:44 just one is a party game that it's goofy and it's silly but uh you flip up a card in front of you and if you're the person that's going you don't actually look at what's on the front of the card and there's gonna be five words or something five somethings words people nouns whatever um that are in front and you just pick a number so i would say okay three and that number might be next to that number is a word that might be potato okay so the rest of you know that the word you're trying to get me to say is potato you have a little white board in front of you and a dry erase marker that you write one word clue no hyphens it has to be one word can't be the same word in a different language no cheating one word so i might decide i'm gonna write on my board chip okay so potato chip um rachel might look at it and go okay i'm gonna write russet so russet potatoes um and then you know jordan my husband might look at his and he might go okay um you know i'm gonna do spud or whatever but the trick is that if jacques puts chip we both have the same word so we all show each other our words first before we we show them to whoever's turn it is and if any of ours match you have to get rid of them so you're trying to figure out words that will help the person figure out the what the answer is but you can't be too specific or easy because somebody else might already

9:15 choose that so you end up with these really obscure and goofy terms to describe something that you wouldn't normally necessarily think of all the time and it because it gets really entertaining it does force you to think outside the box you know i don't want to just put the first thing that pops into my head because that's probably what everybody else is gonna put so yeah yeah wait that's probably one of the most popular family games that i sell it's so easy to teach anybody can play it and i've never seen a group play it that wasn't laughing hysterically so it's just a really great family game so cartographers was the second one and cartographers i know like this much about so you have to tell me all about cartographers rachel i'll let you take this one okay well cartographers has a roll and right essentially like a flip and right and you have a little grid and you have there's a few different biomes or different land types and then there are different rules for each phase of the game and there's four different phases so there's different rules for points and they change each game so it might be you want the largest contiguous group of a forest um to get points or you are trying to surround towers with a certain landscape or something like that um so they're at the end of each phase

10:47 you're scoring um the different objectives and you know i believe you're scoring two two different objectives each phase so um and then there are monsters in the deck that come out and when the monsters come out you have to pass your little map to the person next to you and they get to draw on your map and they draw monster spaces on your map which can totally mess up whatever you've got going so and the monsters count for negative right so like you have to score them they they reduce your score they do yes so there's a little bit of take that but at the same time you're it it's more than just getting in somebody's way you're thinking about like the best way to mess them up so um so there's strategy even in the take that part yes and for such a simple concept because it really is very simple and easy to teach there's a lot of strategy involved in that game and i think the only thing that i would recommend in playing that game is that some kids will have a hard time drawing the different landscapes because it's like a little tree or a little you know river and kids that have maybe don't have as good of fine motor skills might want you might want to get different colored pencils for them um to help them know what they do or help you figure out what they drew

12:18 color code it yeah yeah color coded for sure and even if you have a large group like say you had 10 people playing what you could do is just separate into two groups of five and just be using the same cards for both sides and then they would just compete amongst themselves and that might make things a little easier if you needed to like simplify you know if you had two people that knew how to play the game you could easily just kind of break it apart a little bit and that would work too it reminds me too rachel of the the game that we just played and talked about um nerd words is probably would be the next step from just one actually and it's more it's definitely science related so it's all science terms but the trick with that one is uh that you get a science term like photon and the clues that you give have to start with a letter that's in the word so wow yeah so it gets very tricky very quickly um when you're trying to to figure that out um but not the first letter right because the first letter is you get four clues to give um and the first letter is the fourth clue that you're allowed to give so that way they know what the first letter of the word is um that one is a challenge very challenging yeah with complicated words that not everybody's going to know the definitions yeah yes and the good thing about that one though is it comes with well first of all it comes with a ton of vocabulary cards but then it comes with a whole stack of blank ones so if you have kids

13:49 that are younger ages you could definitely do more simple science concepts or even other fields of study so i know gateway games are a big deal at my house and with the families that i work with are there are there any other games that are sort of quick to teach that can play sort of with a range of interest or a range of ages that come to mind uh the one that i kind of had thought of right away and this is one that i've brought out to play with my high school kids and they jump on it right away i brought it out to play with my nephews and they've jumped on it right away um and it's a very common one but i think it's a good i'm a big fan of cooperative games so rachel's probably not surprised that i'm going to pick a cooperative game right away but and that's castle panic it's a very easy cooperative game it's it's not it might be a little intimidating to look at it first but once you get it out there and you set it up it's really not hard and there's a lot of you know talking to people around so you can help each other out and if you've got a younger kid that that makes life a lot easier you can help them out um and so it's just a good old-fashioned like you're just fighting some arcs you know like fighting orcs and trolls and trying to keep them from getting into the tower and um so that was kind of the one that i had initially thought of and i think that actually plays up to five or six um of course that side's not facing me but um um but i know it plays up but

15:19 up to a decent amount but that was the one that immediately came to mind like if i you know was gonna sit down and play with my nephews or whatever that's that's one that i would probably pull out right away and i know they have my first castle panic so they created uh a younger version but to be honest if you're if you as an adult are playing with the younger kids as long as they're not really little i think you could probably make the normal castle panic work pretty well absolutely and that that my first castle panic is really for the the preschool age its shapes and colors um and teaching sharing so okay that's helpful that's a good skill to know yes yes but i think um i think adults would be a little bored playing that one for too long but the nice thing about any cooperative game is that if you have kids at multiple different ages you can have them buddy up and and work together if you have helpful older siblings yes yes it's a little harder to do that with the cooperative game like magic maze where you're not allowed to talk to each other oh yeah that was difficult you can only bang a wooden pawn in front of the person who has to do their work yes a little step up of a cooperative game is um forbidden island and my nieces and nephews have been playing that for quite a while with my parents um so and my parents don't play a ton of complicated games

16:52 um but that's one that they've been able to play and teach to their grandkids um as young as i believe that ella started playing when she was around six and you know definitely they were helping her but um but that's the great thing about cooperative games is you can help each other out my first instinct when we were talking about games to play at home um my first instinct for a cooperative game was endangered which is one of the newer newer games out from grand gamers guild and um endangered you are trying to save an endangered species it's got that very pandemic type feel to it it's a it's a great game but it's definitely not one for a gateway gamer it's one that if you've got kids that older kids that like games it'd be a great one to give them i'm actually entertaining the idea of bringing it into my environmental classroom and having them create their own modules for it so they would create a module for a new endangered species and have to try to figure out how to make that work in the context of a game but endangered is a game yeah you're just cooperatively trying to save an endangered animal which is pretty cool some games that i like to recommend to families especially especially right now because kids are a little squirrely having been been home for so long are some games that also provide you with some activity so things like happy salmon and funky chicken and with those games there's a stack of cards and you can play with a big group

18:22 with both of those games as well and you have us these cards in your hand and you're flipping them over and they have an action on them and it's either for happy salmon it's high five pound it um switcheroo where you have to switch places and you're looking for somebody else with the same card and so you're shouting out like pound it you know going around in a circle trying to find somebody else that has the same card that'll smack your hand and then you can put that card behind and go on to the next card and you're kind kind of trying to get through your whole deck before anybody else um so it's this just crazy like everybody's shouting at once everybody's like swapping places and like reaching over each other and but it's great for kids i usually bring it out during the holidays when kids are you know we're waiting for dinner that sort of thing kids are getting bored they're getting whiny i'm like okay everybody here's a stack of cards gather around you know and it's i mean i've watched adults play it it's hilarious and so that's one that i recommend especially right now when kids need some sort of recess activity essentially get away from zooming with their class and things like that and um so there's that one there's also ice cool which is we've talked about before on our podcast that has these little weeble wobble

19:53 penguins that you're trying they're actually skipping class to get fish snacks and trying to avoid the hall monitor and one person plays the hall monitor and you're trying to flick them through different rooms the box folds out into different rooms and the home monitor is trying to hit the other penguin players and so with that one you have to sort of run around the table to get the best shot and um line up your shot and because the penguins don't really they're so bottom heavy they don't really follow the rules of physics very logically they they just do funny things because they're wobbly and so you know that's a game where people usually are laughing the whole time they're playing too so um those are games that i'm recommending right now with kids who are just you know people are coming in saying my kids are so bored they're driving me crazy i'm like well here's some here's some good active games that they can play right that don't necessarily require close adult supervision to play right it is sometimes hard to find games that'll get people moving around i mean we don't have gym classes anymore so right uh it makes it a real challenge that the gyms are closed that the uh you know for a long time the parks were closed you couldn't do very much of anything physical jenna do you have any physical activity games that that you like to play as a family well i just

21:23 did teach my mom and dad ice cool and that was really fun because my mom and dad we grew up in very much a card playing family i grew up playing cribbage and we played hearts and pitch and you know we we definitely went that route when we were camping and that kind of stuff so um we taught my mom and dad ice cool which was a lot of fun so that that one is the same for me really the only other one that i have that's probably more active uh would probably be i mean we have our crocodile board but you do stay pretty stationary on that one and i know you were talking about you've got a crocodile board coming soon oh it's arrived oh my gosh have you started playing it yet oh yes yeah i have so yeah i have a crocodile board that arrived and this surface is like ice so i don't know how long it's going to stay that way but the you know almost almost like your ice cool penguins those things just travel in ways that you wouldn't like they go so far and so fast and there's everything so bouncy then it's uh it's a crazy game so the kids have all come down to play that but it's more of a two-player we can't get a big group together for that one and we've been playing because one of my kids is a real sniper on that game we've been playing by tournament rules so you've got to keep yourself seated when you take those shots you can't stand up around the board no you're right big trouble with dad it is it's in the rules you can't do it um but really you know other than that the only other one um that we have that gets

22:56 not necessarily gets you up and moving around but it's it's more active is called whoosh uh and this is a stronghold game uh it is cute i i totally honest i bought it at gen con because of the cute monster on the front not even gonna lie it was an impulse buy that was adorable i judged a book by its cover and i picked up a game and i was not sad about it um and it's a game kind of like uh slap jack a little bit but a little more complicated because you've got three monsters that are coming towards your town and you are townspeople trying to capture these cute monsters and so each monster has a series of icons that will capture them so usually it's like two arrows a sword a fireball and an ice ball or whatever and each of you as the hunters on the outside are flipping a card one at a time and as soon as you kind of lay them all out as soon as all of the icons for that particular monster are met the first one to slap it gets it so it becomes a memory game of trying to remember what icons are on the table and there's three monsters out that each require different icons and so you're trying to keep track of all these things um and that one i will say most people end up standing up for after a while just because they're like okay i have to see everything i can't see everything and so that's probably the only other one aside from i school that we have that's a more active game but yeah wow so now one of the things i wanted to make sure i know we're coming up to the

24:27 end of our time together but one of the things i wanted to make sure that i talked about before we we ended our chat where you know do you have any recent sort of favorite family gaming moments anything that's come up that's really stood out for you that we haven't already talked about yet you got one i'm thinking um so we we just uh carefully met up with um one of my old high school friends um i'm i'm good friends with her and her brother brothers and so we were able to kind of plan and safely get together at a house over a weekend and just kind of spend some time together and we taught them five tribes and five tribes is a i know it's rachel and jock's favorite game it's really high up there for me i love five tribes um and so i hadn't played it very often but we played it with uh my friend and her husband and then um i don't think my husband played i think it was tyler one of the one of our other friends played and it was really fun because uh the the couple we were playing with are just getting past the gateway games you know what i mean like they they've been into the gateway games and they're just getting into that and so it was really fun at the end when we were all battling for points because you know you're trying to figure out the best way to not let other people get good moves but get your own good moves and get the things you want and we had a 20-minute conversation about how we could help lisa win

26:00 because she was so close but i had enough products in front of me that i we were pretty sure i had it i mean we hadn't counted up points yet but we still like we spent a good amount of time sitting there trying to kind of help each other figure out how to win and that was just kind of fun you know it was just good healthy competition like hey what's the best move here what could what could she do to make it so that she she could win um but yeah she didn't i still won but but it was cool it was kind of a fun moment to just sit and talk about you know i think that's a really good next step for a gateway like for just gateway gamers where it's there is a little bit of analysis paralysis though but if you're looking for kind of a puzzly game that's the next step i think five tribes is a good one awesome awesome rachel do you have one i do um so this was a little while ago but my parents were up visiting they live in indiana actually not too far from indianapolis conveniently so i'm looking forward to gen cons in the future but we were actually playing a school and my mom my mom the first time she plays a game she asks lots of questions and she pretends i think she pretends that she's not catching on but the second time she plays that game with you she will wipe the floor with you and so my mom and dad were up and my husband and i were playing a sewell with them and we were telling up points at the end and my mom just

27:31 by a long shot just crushed us and jack turns to me and my husband and he goes rachel tell your mom to go home it was so funny because they're best buds my mom and my husband so it's just it was silly but i think another uh just great it wasn't a family party at all it was an adult dinner party that i had recently we busted out high school and we were laughing so hard it was it was great because i had people that don't typically like to game or don't really like complicated games um and so i brought out ice cool and we i mean we were just like four kids running around the table it was a lot of fun so good so good well thank you so much rachel and jennifer joining me today i'm glad it all worked out this all happened we all met one another through a facebook post where i said yeah it would be fun to meet up with some of the people who are creating you know game-based uh content on the internet so um i'm glad we're able to do this today i am too it was really nice to meet you yeah super nice meeting you as well thanks for joining me yes thank you thanks again to jenna and rachel for joining me on the show if you are interested in hearing more from them you can track them down wherever you download podcasts just search for the friendly local game pod if you have any questions or suggestions for me you can find me as always at

29:01 brian at brainsongames.ca brainsongames.ca is the website where you'll find the previous episodes and future episodes of the show will go there brains on games is the twitter handle and the facebook page and the instagram feed so we're all over the place and if you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to be notified when more episodes get posted all you have to do is head on over to youtube and press that subscribe button thanks for joining me and hopefully i'll see you next time you